Majari Magazine

Algae: Fuels and CO2 Sequestration

by Michael Hutagalung on 11/12/08 at 2:26 am | 5 Comments | |

A brief explanation about algae utilization to produce vegetable oils, fuels, and to sequester carbon dioxide at the same time, by Glen Kertz, the CEO of Valcent Products USA.

All we have is a closed-loop photo bio-reactor. Our goal is to produce the greatest amount of biomass from algae that we can. By going vertical we believe that we can increase the yield by increasing the surface area and the volume of material getting exposed to sunlight. We have a system that continually recycles, it’s a dynamic system, in a closed-loop.

Algae goes down, starts out of a tank, gets picked up by pumps, goes up into the reactors, and then gravity heights control, lose it to the reactors, get exposed to sunlight, go back into the tank, and the cycle repeated over and over again. Algae is the fastest organism, fastest growing plant on the planet. And it sequesters the greatest amount of carbon dioxide, but in the same time, it produces lipids, basically vegetable oils, and a lot of it. So, if you look at a single-cell of algae in the right species, as much as 50% of its body weight is high-grade vegetable oil. So while we are sequestering carbon dioxide, we are also producing these high-grade lipids that can be used for a variety of purposes.

The beauty of the algae is the fact that we can actually be selective about what carbon chains are coming out of it. So for example, if you want to make jet fuel, we could give you a strain of algae that’s going to make the carbon chains necessary to manufacture jet fuel much more efficiently that you can in the other crop. If you want to make diesel for a truck, we can give you the carbon chains that are ideal for that. We can tailor the lipids based on the species of algae that we are growing.

If I grow an acre of corn and I’m looking at it from the stand point of producing oil, I can grow about 18 gallons of oil per acre per year. Moving up to the most prevalent, palm, we can get 7,800 gallons per acre per year; algae can go up to 20,000 gallons of oil per acre per year. And that’s just from the open-surface system, and not from the closed bio-reactor system.

The problem with the open-surface system is that one: once the algae starts growing, light will only penetrate about an inch or an inch and a half to the surface; it blocks light from the rest of the surface. We also have an enormous amount of water evaporation so we’re losing enormous amount of water that causing us to replace. And third most critical thing to us, we get contaminants from other algae species that flowed from the atmosphere and landed there and become competitive with the algae that we want to grow.

We would try to recapture every drop of water that we can. And the only water we lose is what actually bound up in the algae and goes into the oil itself and the byproduct from the algae. And once we’ve extracted the oil, we can even use the byproduct for feedstock, for sour remediation to make fertilizer, or we can ferment it and produce ethanol out of that.

If we took one-tenth of the State of New Mexico and convert it to algae production, we could meet all the energy demands for the entire United States.

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